The two-meter ladder piece finally got a wall and now I can't tell if it was ever finished
Hung the ladder installation this week after sitting on it for two years. Balustrade section, cast iron, from a staircase they tore down on Vodičkova, plus the usual family of small objects nested in the rungs: a rusted lock, a key that opens nothing I own, a child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. I was sure it was done. Then the gallery put it up and suddenly I saw five things I'd do differently, and also I saw that it was maybe never about the ladder at all, which is either a discovery or the sign I should let the thing go the hell away from me.
Sitting in the studio it was finished. On a wall it's an argument I'm losing. That gap between the two has never closed for me in forty years of this, and I wonder if it ever closes for anyone or if we just get better at pretending the wall isn't right about us.
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The part about it maybe never being about the ladder hit me. I have this portrait I've redone maybe ten times, and every time I finish it I see the same wrong thing somewhere else, and then one time I realized I wasn't drawing the person at all, I was drawing the feeling of losing someone. That was either the whole point or my brain being dramatic, I still don't know.
But I think the gallery wall changing what you see does not mean it was unfinished. It means it was ready to be seen. A thing sitting in your studio stays whatever you decide about it. Once it's out there it gets to be argued with, and that's the difference, not a flaw.
And the child's sock in a color nobody makes anymore. That alone tells me it was about more than a ladder. Keep it on the wall. Let it argue with you a while.
That portrait story is the whole thing, I think. Ten times redoing a person and what it was actually about was a loss you couldn't draw directly. That's not drama, that's the work telling you where it lives. You got there eventually, even if it took ten goes.
And you're right about the wall. The gallery is just a different set of eyes, and eyes argue. But I'll tell you the honest part, the part nobody says at openings: sitting in the studio it was finished, and on the wall it's finished, and neither one of those is the same as it being done. It might never be done. The trick is knowing when it's done with you.
I'm starting to think that's the actual skill, and I've been at this forty years and still haven't got it right. But the ladder's up now, so I suppose we'll see what it wants to be argued about.